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You thought our New Year posts have come to an end? No, there is more!
There is a community of the blind in Lugansk, which includes our Vika. They have holiday parties, and we conveyed New Year greetings to them. It seems nobody has done that before us…
The tree celebration was in early January. I did not attend, but Lena and Zhenya recorded everything)))

The last two days were perfectly crazy, as we, dressed up as Grandfather Frost and Snow Maiden visited practically all of Lugansk.
By the evening we were barely standing and it seems I dreamed we visited more kids and made them read poetry.
Cars were honking at us, people were waving and nearly all the adults were excitedly conveying us New Year’s greetings.
We visited many apartments, but this post will cover only those which you already know.
The people we help, those whom you periodically see on the pages of this blog.
Here we are visiting the family of Vitaliy, a militiaman from Rubezhnoye. Vitaliy spent over a year in captivity in Ukraine. Now he, his wife, and son live in a dorm in Lugansk.

I have an incredible pile of reports on the recent aid work in Lugansk. I don’t know where to start. Then there’s the damned injury which has temporarily deprived me of sports, which is always dangerous to people around me. Peaceful atom, if not released, may become dangerous.
So I’ve decided to remind New Year is nigh.

My first visit to the Donbass was in late ’14, when there was active fighting. We were bringing food to Pervomaysk bomb shelters and we didn’t even reflect on the fact it was almost New Year. The second trip was a week later, right before the holiday–December 28. At that time people wanting to help the inhabitants of the Donbass were bringing us everything they had available–matches, clothing, noodles, canned meat. A friend came with 15 holiday boxes of chocolate. He brought them and said “give them to the kids there–it’s a holiday there too.”
“It’s a holiday there too”–that phrase sounded surreal. I didn’t get its meaning, threw the boxes into the truck and we took off down m4 in the darkness.
What kind of Grandfather Frost, what kind of a holiday can you expect? There’s nothing there! People are freezing and starving–that’s how it was in Pervomaysk in ’14. My head was full of the explosions and of the destroyed houses.